Editors’ spring break podcast picks

With spring break next week, many students are gearing up for long plane rides and road trips. What better time to get lost in the excitement of a new podcast? The sheer amount of great podcasts out there can be overwhelming, so here are our staff’s recommendations for what to listen to next.

After following along weekly with show host Andrea Silenzi’s podcast about relationships, “Why Oh Why,” I feel like she and I are friends. Her frank conversations about how love and sex intersect with technology are insightful, but the biggest appeal is in Silenzi’s own unabashed earnestness. Though some elements of the podcast build off one another — namely, the portions related to Silenzi’s personal life — most of the episodes can be enjoyed a la carte. My top picks: Ep. 8, “How Will I Know?” the story of Silenzi’s last breakup told in achingly honest detail,Ep. 9, “Just My Swipe,” a real-life dating game with bachelor contestants sourced from Tinder swipes and Ep. 19, “Dudes in Bars,” featuring conversations with men at 10 different bars around the country on the day of the Women’s March.(Emily Williams, Managing Editor)

In this episode of “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me” host, Peter Sagal subjects Chance the Rapper to a guessing game based off of saran wrapping, a derivative of his role as a rapper. This particular episode is light-hearted and features Sagal raving about one of Chance’s earlier hits “Sunday Candy,” which is about his grandmother. I feel like this podcast accurately reflects Chance’s earnest attitude about his career as a “nice-boy rapper” who cares about his city and its people. Recently, Chance has skyrocketed in the music industry and in Chicago politics. After winning three Grammy’s in February, Chance caught the eye of Illinois governor Bruce Rauner and requested a meeting to discuss funding for Chicago Public Schools (CPS).Chance has since pledged $1 million dollars to CPS in addition to paving the way for music as an unsigned artist whose mixtapes have been released free to the public since 2012. (Céilí Doyle, Senior Staff Writer)

“Heavyweight” didn’t appeal to me at first. In the show, Jonathan Goldstein finds out what went wrong in people’s lives or a specific thing they regret and makes them address those things head-on. I didn’t want to hear other people talking about their problems, but as I listened to more, I started to contemplate my own relationships that I have with people. One that really stuck with me is about a young girl named Tara. In college, Jonathan watched an experimental video titled “Anger” that had a scene of a young girl sitting in silence while her parents sobbed, one talking about what it feels like to be intersexed. Years later, Jonathan still thinks about the girl in the video and if she’s okay, so that’s what he seeks to find out in “Tara.” While some episodes are more light-hearted than others, they’re definitely all worth the listen. (Audrey Davis, News Editor)